Hi there! Where can I find what were the most popular Linux distros in 2001-2004, before ubuntu came to dominate the Linux world? On a side note - do you think the ubuntu glory days are soon coming to an end?

Red Hat Linux is one of the earlier linux distros, As well as Debian (Which is Ubuntu's Codebase), i've looked at it and it seems pretty interesting, Especially the "Bluecurve" in RHL9, Which looks pretty awesome IMO

Debian - which is what Ubuntu was based upon.

Debian, Red Hat and Mandrake were quite big at that time, just to name a few.
The page hit ranking indicator on http://distrowatch.com/ is not a significant data source and you can't rely on it, but it's kind of funny.
Answering the second question, I think Ubuntu is doing well and it will be in great shape for the next couple of years.

Solaris is not Linux.

Here's some more distros: Desktop L/X, TurboLinux, Lindows (now Linspire), Fedora Core (now Fedora)

Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core, Debian, Linspire (now discontinued).

Thanks guys!
But I am also interested in why did they fell out of favor? Were they not user-friendly enough or what? BTW, talking about user-friendliness, I tried the latest ubuntu and it's not user-friendly imo as Linux Mint (I tried the KDE version of that).

Ubuntu's main aim was user-friendliness from day one. Most people thought that Ubuntu surpassed almost every other distribution in this respect.

Come on, I think Ubuntu maybe a distro for starters. Linux is for working but not entertainment. Ubuntu is built from Debian, but doesn't contribute to Linux except to its own community. It spends most of its time making a better outside, which disorders the inner design; in this sense, maybe Ubuntu is moving away from Linux.
Debian is classic!

Ironic that the new default Unity UI is a buggy mess and is completely unorganized.

I'm not talking about Unity, I'm talking about what Ubuntu was like and why most people liked it back then.

I guess she means she finds ironic that back in the old days Ubuntu was seen as the ultimate in Linux user experience, and now it's got an highly criticized UI and it has lost a lot of users because of that... ironic, indeed.
I quite like Ubuntu and Unity, but I can see that.

Mandrake Linux.

SuSE was a great Linux distro back then, but I think it's heyday was around the 9.3 release, not that the latest versions are bad.

Sorry, I had an issue with remembering something when i posted that

Red Hat Linux (RHL), SuSE Linux and Mandrake.

These are the ones i know of, though.

Imagine what Linux Mint is, then. Anyway, thank god for Xubuntu, because it leaves users with a working distro - after all of the horrendous changes that had happened as of late. I like it ((X)ubuntu) because it works, unlike Debian, Arch and others; it doesn't require a week of work before it becomes functional and it's GNU, hence it's easy.

;$

Mandrake Linux, later renamed to Mandrakelinux, and later renamed to Mandriva in 2005. During 2010, the company laid off most of its senior employee/developers. So the community forked Mageia.

Mandriva still exists today, but most user/developer community now contribute to Mageia. Last time I heard that the company want to give the distribution to a non-profit organization called openMandriva. And their new commercial product, Mandriva business server, was based on Mageia.

Before Ubuntu came around the most popular distros here in Germany were openSUSE, Fedora and Debian. Where openSUSE and Fedora were preferred by users new to Linux whereas Debian was the distro of choice for experienced Linux users.

For hardcore Linux nuts there's still Gentoo and Slackware

I used Ubuntu for quite a while but have switched back to Fedora recently because I don't quite like the direction Ubuntu is headed.